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Internet Hackcess
It was nearly a year ago that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe. Later it was reported that the collective hacker group “Anonymous” was responsible for taking down sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.
Last weekend there was a repeat performance from Anonymous where another government site was hacked to send a message. The United States Sentencing Commission site was hacked twice. It was done late Friday night and then again on Sunday. The site was replaced by a video claiming that the United States government had forced Aaron Swartz to commit suicide. Many people in the mainstream world are unaware that brilliant programmers and internet designers are being harassed by the United States government.
Swartz was a brilliant technologist who committed suicide after facing felony charges and 30 years imprisonment for downloading over 4 million JSTOR articles. This is an extremely harsh sentence and is literally the same amount of time terrorists get when they kill scores of people. Recently this was illustrated in a Yale law college exposé written by Nathan Robinson who pointed out that David Headley, the American Islamist who plotted the brutal attacks in Mumbai in which hundreds of civilians were casually gunned down was sentenced to 35 years.
All Swartz did was download millions of for-pay academic articles and then he was relentlessly pursued by the federal government – with the cooperation of MIT! Once again, this tragic story illustrates the increasingly unaccountable power of the United States government and how people’s lives are destroyed by the recent empowerment given to them for the guarantee of security.
According to Robinson, “Headley the terrorist had been sentenced in federal court to 35 years for helping to plot the al-Qaeda-linked attacks. Headley had conducted the extensive surveillance and scouting missions in India that made the killings possible. But though David Headley was an admitted terrorist with a crucial role in “India’s 9/11,” the U.S. government did not choose to assassinate him via drone, shoot first and dump his body in the sea later, or even arrange a loaded court proceeding for him — the usual approaches. Headley is different, because he had for some time been a paid informant of the United States government, working for the Drug Enforcement Agency and sent to Pakistan in that capacity.”
Swartz was just some guy down lading academic papers and was given a sentence as severe as a known Al Qaeda operative.
This was the reason Anonymous distributed a basic code of the government site , which turned the website into a version of the video game “Asteroids.” Players were invited to shoot away at the homepage to reveal a Guy Fawkes mask made up of text, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”
In targeting the Sentencing Commission site, hackers symbolically took aim at a justice system wherein minimum sentencing laws put undue power in the hands of government prosecutors, who can exact guilty pleas from suspects afraid of facing hefty jail sentences at trial. “The federal sentencing guidelines,” Anonymous’ message on the site read, “enable prosecutors to cheat citizens of their constitutionally-guaranteed right to a fair trial.”
The sickening thing about this case is that, according to “The Nation,” JSTOR and MIT now insist they would have been only too happy to drop the matter, but prosecutors pushed forward, throwing four felony charges at Swartz, who then faced a maximum sentence of thirty-five years in prison, along with fines of up to $1 million. Prosecutors shoveled on nine more felony counts in September, bringing the total to thirteen.
This demonstrates the predatory nature of the government now and how they have no regard for anyone and that the severity of the sentencing does not match the crime. The question is can we excuse this relentless abuse of power against a promising young technical student whose only crime was the sharing of academic journals?
This is the same the government that so many people will tell could not have the insensitivity of exploiting the deaths of 20 children at Sandy Hook or even possibly hiring a group of mercenaries to go in and do the deed to further an agenda.
This does not make any sense.
How is it that, in a country that claims that it is fair and has freedom, a judge would even have the option to hit him with a 30-year sentence for the offense he committed? How disproportionate is this?
Last year, Richard Clarke the former counter terrorism Czar told Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig that there would be in the foreseeable future what he called an ‘i9/11‘ or ‘Internet 9/11′ where a major attack would take place online. This event would force government officials to incorporate an internet “patriot act” limiting freedom of speech and freedom of movement online.
Now it seems that the government has decided to bring on the attacks by being inappropriately predatory when it comes to what is called “illegal downloads.”
This is forcing the hand of “hactivists” that want to show the government that their security firewalls are vulnerable and as many people have speculated and or pushed, the cyber war may be the first place where the so called revolution will begin.
We need to keep things into perspective. What Aaron Swartz did was the equivalent of illegally checking out too many library books and then being thrown into prison for as many years as a wanted terrorist. This is how we are now in America. We are thinking that the decisions of our government are sound and sane. They are acting with malice and their machinations are out of control.
It is also not beyond the possibility that government itself is creating these cyber crises in order to justify more control over the people’s printing press. I find it very convenient that all this has happened around the same time that a new TIME magazine article is opening the dialogue about the possibility of making the Internet a public utility.
There seems to be a race between lobbyists and others to give more control to a few people in order to allegedly avoid such horrible attacks.
TIME magazine recently brought up the subject matter in order to promote a new book by Susan Crawford called “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly in the New Guilded Age.”
Crawford argues that the Internet has replaced traditional phone service as the most essential communications utility in the country and is now as important as electricity was 100 years ago.
“Truly high-speed wired Internet access is as basic to innovation, economic growth, social communication, and the country’s competitiveness as electricity was a century ago,” Crawford writes, “but a limited number of Americans have access to it, many can’t afford it, and the country has handed control of it over to Comcast and a few other companies.”
Because the U.S. government has allowed a small group of giant, highly profitable companies to dominate the broadband market, Crawford argues, American consumers have fewer choices for broadband service, at higher prices but lower speeds, compared to dozens of other developed countries, including throughout Europe and Asia.
The federal government has taken on the task of increasing broadband access in part because it expects that increased access will improve the economy, as well as health care surveillance apparatus being proposed by the Obama administration.
According to a recent Verizon customer survey, more than half of consumers believe that broadband service is their most important utility. Which is a little ironic since power to even run the internet isn’t mentioned in the survey. In some cases people would rather have no heat than lose their internet.
Internet speeds are also slower here than in most countries and the lure of the internet as a public utility is the promise that connection speeds will improve and that there will be more competition and less monopolies on who controls the Internet access.
However, the Internet becoming a utility actually bring up many problems with regard to internet freedom.
A recent article in Slate magazine proposed that we nationalize Facebook. This way the government can step in and use the information provided in the social network for their use. The idea is that while Facebook’s privacy record has been called horrible, they believe that the government would be able to put the information provided on Facebook to good use in order to solve many of our social problems in the United States.
How gullible are we? I can’t believe that after what has happened to Aaron Swartz and even Sandy Hook anyone can believe a predatory government would use anything data mined from a social network to solve any social problems.
The article written by Phillip Howard demonstrates how people have somehow allowed themselves to be duped into believing the government has our best interests at heart:
On January 28th 2013 the country recognized “Data Privacy Day” – and Ironically the biggest sponsors of this day were Facebook and AT&T. AT&T was allegedly complicit in “massive and illegal” FISA program of unconstitutional surveillance.
‘Data Privacy Day’ has been held on January 28th every year since 2008. It is an effort to empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint and escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone’s priority.
This is some hollow joke in order to give the hypocritical aesthetic that in the aftermath of the George W. Bush post-9/11 surveillance state we have Barack Obama somehow not extolling or supporting the virtues of FISA and the illegal wiretapping and spying on United States citizens?
Please allow me to refresh your memory that Barack Obama renewed FISA’s wiretapping for five more years at the end of 2012 and that this so-called ‘Data Privacy Day’ is a government-backed initiative that aims to “empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint and escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone’s priority.”
Just how empowered are we really?
It is obvious that regulating the internet as a public utility would undo years of of free-market, hands-off Internet policy that has made the Internet the greatest engine of economic growth, creativity and innovation the world has ever seen. It would also give the government another powerful cudgel in their predatory pursuits.
With the death of Aaron Swartz, we see what they can do in the real world. Now imagine what they can do to your electronic footprint if we give them total control.
Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org
2013-01-30 19:15:16
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